The Historic Imagination in George Eliot

Abstract

History was the seed-bed of George Eliot’s creative imagination: as the objective process and register of human actions and events, and as the subjective ‘remembrance of things past’. In her earlier writing the sense of the past is the primary impetus. As she wrote soon after publishing Adam Bede: ‘my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked through before I can begin to use artistically any material I may gather in the present’. The accent is personal, the voice tinged with nostalgic remembrance for Shepperton Church or Dorlcote Mill bridge. The evocation of familiar scene and occasion in The Mill on the Floss won praise from Proust. The backward glance induces the pastoral colour and rhythms of Adam Bede.